Transcription
Dark City is a 1998 film directed by Alex Proyas. John Murdoch awakens to find he has no memory. He does not remember his name, his past, or the woman he is told is his wife, Emma. He is hunted by Inspector Bumstead, a detective who comes to believe John is a serial killer.
John is also hunted by mysterious pale men in dark clothing, later referred to as the Strangers. These Strangers are alien life forms inhabiting the bodies of dead men. Their purpose is to experiment on the memories of human beings, exchanging their pasts while they sleep, giving them new identities unbeknownst to them. They are trying to find the secret to the human soul. Nobody in the city is who their memories tell them they are. Their previous identities are lost and constantly changed at the hands of the Strangers.
John discovers that he cannot leave the city. Nobody can, because they are not on Earth. They are drifting through space, and there is no way out. With the help of Dr. Schreber, John defeats the Strangers, learns to control the city with the powers of his mind, and tries to form a relationship with Emma, in spite of the fact that following a memory change, she now no longer knows who John is. "I'm headed that way myself. Would you like to join me?"
Dark City crashes into centuries of philosophical debate and scholarly work on the subject of personal identity. What, what does being the person that you are from one day to the next consist of? Do you have a personal identity, or is it all an illusion, a collection of impressions and stimuli? This subject was discussed in a previous episode, but I only scratched the surface. Dark City presents different experiments and hypotheticals to ponder.
The film's focus on personal identity is why fingerprints appear so often in the film. Inspector Bumstead is investigating a series of murders, mistakenly believing that John is a serial killer. The murderer leaves spirals on the victims. Later, Bumstead looks at a spiral while looking at a fingerprint. Fingerprints: a means of identifying a person. A spiral: a dizzying swirl. The film conveys through these images that discovering the secret to personal identity is a confusing maze.
People generally believe that they are the same person from one day to the next. In this scene, John is shown images of himself as a child. People recall what it is like to be a child and believe that child is themselves, and not some other separate person, in spite of the fact that that child now looks and behaves nothing like themselves. Belief that the child is only superficially different from the adult is the concept of personal identity: the notion that a person at one time is the same thing as a person at another time.
Throughout the film, having no memory and being the subject of memory experiments, John denies what others tell him is his past and that these fragments of memories do not define him. He claims that he simply knows that he is not a murderer. Philosophers would say that John is asserting that there is an essential property to who he is now.
Dark City is a science fiction film in which the narrative plainly tells us, eventually, about the realness of human beings and the realness of their memories. But this fiction engages with a lot of questions that do not presently have a consensus answer. Let's look at another character for a moment. Is the man who owns the apartment building the same man once the Strangers have changed his memory and made him a newspaper salesman? Is the new apartment building owner, with the previous owner's memories, now functionally the same man as the one who preceded him?
Belief that owner number one is still exactly the same person as he was, even though he no longer remembers his fabricated past life, is an example of body theory. The philosophical concept that states that personal identity persists over time because we are our bodies, or that we exist within our bodies. This might be a little misleading based on what we now know about how often our body replaces skin cells, blood cells, etc. Anyway, this man's entire life is different now, not just his occupation, but everything he remembers doing. We could say that his new memories are implanted, yes, but his previous memories from when he was the owner of the apartment building were too. What is the essential property that still makes this man this man? His brain, part of his physical body, is still there, but it contains completely different data than before. It may as well be a new brain.
And this brings us to memory theory, the chief subject of the film. Memory theory posits that your personal identity persists because of a link of memories between the present and the past. Of course, we don't remember everything we have ever done. We have huge gaps in our early childhood memories, for example, and we have trouble recollecting comparatively recent memories too. For example, you might find it easy to remember your best friend's name, even if you have not seen them in weeks, but remembering what outfit you wore last Wednesday might be tricky. That does not mean that this chain is broken, though, because you can most likely remember something you did on Wednesday. That Wednesday version of yourself, even if it is just that you went to work that day, and that version of yourself probably did remember what outfit you wore.
So, let's go back to the new owner of the apartment building. By the standards of body theory, there is definitely a new person running the building. But someone convinced by memory theory would say that this body contains the memories previously held by the other man and is therefore the same person. Similarly, when John loses all of his memories in the beginning of the film, a believer in memory theory might suggest that he is now a completely different person than his body was before.
Just for a moment, let's pretend John actually did commit the murder, even though as the audience we know that the murders were at the hands of the Strangers instead. But let's just have an experiment within the film's own experiment. The murders took place before the events of the film. Assuming John actually was the serial killer, once his memory was wiped clean in the beginning of the film, would he still be morally responsible? Not legally responsible, but morally. How can one hold someone accountable if that someone is not actually the someone from before? Is he the same person following the murders now that everything he ever was is gone, everything that ever made him John Murdoch? Your answer might tell you a lot about where you think personal identity resides.
Some philosophers actually reject the notion of personal identity. An argument against a human being having a personal identity is the skeptical claim that we have no experience of a simple individual impression that we can call the self. What is perceived as our personal identity is only a collection of impressions and stimuli. These impressions do not exist in one place and change from moment to moment. And if that is true, then the self is only an illusion.
People generally do not want to acknowledge this possibility. We feel so strongly that we are ourselves, whatever ourselves are. And while one should not discount such a powerful inclination, a feeling or desire that something just is cannot be the sum of one's argument. However, even without any knowledge about the philosophy of personal identity, society tacitly accepts it as fact, as a means of structuring our world and our responsibilities, merely as a way to simplify life. We believe that we are the same people from one day to the next.
Bumstead accepts that Emma and John are married, even though they were said to have had their ceremony four years ago. Society accepts that Emma and John are still Emma and John years later. Bumstead investigates a series of murders. The murderer, he believes, is the same man on Monday when he killed a woman as he is on Tuesday. When society assigns responsibility to our actions, it passively acknowledges personal identity, not for heady philosophical reasons, but as a method of maintaining some semblance of order. If we rejected personal identity, we would also reject responsibility. You can't argue your way out of being arrested for murder by saying that you are a different person now than when you were when you committed the crime, or that personal identity does not exist. So citizens are under no obligation to pay for their misdeeds. If you believe that people persist in their personal identities, that means you may have obligations towards them. If you do not believe that people persist in their personal identities, that means you probably don't, because they and you do not exist the way humankind cannot help but functionally accept that they do. Personal identity, whether true or false, is a kind of practical philosophy that allows the world to operate.
These particular science fiction scenarios do not exist in the real world, of course, but sci-fi allows us to explore our philosophies under unusual situations that test our theories in ways that we cannot test in real life. Dark City presents an extreme case of memory theory experiments by giving us a world in which memories are conjured in a laboratory and exchanged. But the questions that philosophers have about memory theory and the big question of Dark City is the same: Are we more than the sum of our memories? The film says yes, we are.
The Strangers are not simply searching for human memories. They have already helped invent and implement a way to make memories physical in these concoctions and interchangeable as well. Now the Strangers are searching for the very existence of the human soul. "You wanted to know what it was about us that made us human. When you're not going to find it in here." He went looking in the wrong place.
The Strangers possess a collective mind. They are not individuals in the strictest sense. They do not have individual memories. And because humans do, they believe that they must also have souls. Putting aside the fact that humans and the Strangers may simply be biologically different, Dark City instead posits that they are different because of the human soul. John tells Mr. Hand that the Strangers were looking for the human soul in the wrong place, but John does not give a hypothesis on where it might actually be, which means the movie does not make that attempt either.
The location of the human soul is a subject of debate, even among those who absolutely believe in the soul's existence. Some proclaim that it is connected to the body, whereas others say it is physically independent. The director, who also co-wrote the movie, said that the film sought to explore whether or not there was a spark of identity within people, even after stripping everything else away.
Belief and disbelief in the soul are actually ancient, and not just among religions, but also philosophers. Plato famously believed in immortality, once writing in a dramatic depiction of the death of Socrates that everything has an opposite, and everything works in cycles. When something is dark, it was previously bright, and it will be dark again. He would argue, when someone awakes, he was previously asleep, and he will awaken again, and so forth. Opposites and cycles. By his logic, being alive is opposite to being dead, and as much as death comes from life, life must too come from death. And if the body no longer functions to allow life to persist, then something else must, like a soul.
Conversely, disbelief in the soul is similarly ancient. Epicurus believed that we are our bodies, and when our bodies die, everything that we are dies too. He was what we would call a materialist. And there are thousands of other perspectives before Plato and Epicurus, and a thousand afterwards, none of which Dark City really tackles head-on. Instead, it declares that the soul exists by implication. John has no memories at the beginning of the film, yet he is still morally repulsed by actions such as murder. He is able to make judgments not from experience, but from something else inside him. The aforementioned building owner turned newspaper salesman uses the same phrase about his life in both instances, suggesting that there is some core to his being that exists outside of his experiences.
Dark City does not say why there is a soul, only that there is. There is certainly more to it, but since Dark City does not go much deeper than that, neither will I, at least not today. Dark City cannot solve the problem of the human soul within its less than 2-hour run time, but it does not attempt to do so. The world instead creates a lot of other challenging thought experiments. That is the soul of Dark City.
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